Red String
by Denwa
Summary: The pounding of doors mean nothing to him. [Sasuke, Naruto.]


**Red String.**  
_Written by China Daiquiri_.

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—but it's when he looks at his hands, he believes that his mother lied to him about the red string tied around his fingers. She says that it's invisible, but he thinks venomously that the sharingan can see everything—if it can see the flow of a person's chakra, then why can't it see a silly piece of red string? 

He lies on his back, on his bed, holding his right hand up like some lovesick girl—he wants to _do_ something, not just sit here and wait for the sky to fall down. It's _boring_ like this. He thinks harshly, _Fuck the mailman, fuck the milkman, fuck Kakashi, and fuck that grandmother of a Hokage—I'm not moving from here_. The train of thought sounded like a child's angry words running through his head. How old is he again? So many days had gone by—he locked himself up in the old Uchiha estate—that he had forgotten.

And being a shinobi didn't help much, if not at all. He was one—shinobi weren't exactly the most stable person on the street.

The faint knocking on his door—he just noticed it—grew from faint, fragile, and afraid (he would have to see who it was, sooner or later) to loud, obnoxious, and partially rude (Naruto or Sakura?) until the noise echoed in his skull, and he hears a very earsplitting screech (it was Naruto)—the voice says angrily, "_Oi, Sasuke-teme, are you just gonna rot in there or something?_" and silently, in his head, he replies scathingly, _Yes; from the inside._

"Sasuke-teme, I'm worried about you!" the voice shouts again and he knows that the blonde boy is lying and thinks, _Fuck you_. "Sasuke-teme," Naruto tries again, pleadingly, "_Sakura-chan_ is worried about you!" And then, _Fuck Sakura, too_. "Kakashi-sensei, too, you know!" _Fuck Kakashi_. "So, _please_ come out!"

Not on amiable terms do they speak (so why should they even bother to start right _now?_), and secretly, he is bellicose—_feels_ bellicose, is the definition of bellicose—when the blonde's determined, hardened, somewhat piercing voice knocks him out of his dreams. Maybe (he can feel it from his head, his mind) this was what it felt like to truly hate your brother—but the other rational, cold-hearted, down-to-earth side of him said that Naruto wasn't even there from the beginning, was he? Naruto just popped out of nowhere and Sakura suddenly showed her real personality and Kakashi started to believe that they could grow, and why were they replacing—_replacing?_—his dead family?

The loud knocks, turning into pounding of the door; Naruto's faint, heavy breathing turned into something like sobs—he really couldn't tell from this far. Desperation. Desperation to "bring him back"; "to knock some sense into him"; "to make him realize that _this was not alright_"—was it really worth their two and a half years time—

_Al niente_—the pounding turned _to nothing_—maybe it was because the wooden doors were too _hard_ like his heart and Naruto's hands were bleeding (at this, Sasuke sneers and says quietly to himself, "Then why don't you get Sakura to bring the door down instead of being a sadist?"), maybe Naruto gave up (but he _never ever_ gives up), maybe someone told him to stop, maybe it was something different entirely than what he could come up with.

"_Sasuke_," Naruto tries again (he says "_Sasuke_" as if it were some kind of last haven so he can stop and rest—his voice is cracking). "_Sasuke_, just open up the damn door."

"No." He is monotone, as usual (he is proud that he didn't say, "Yes, Itachi, I'll be there in a second"), his words clipped but dripping with venom like a snake's fangs (but Orochimaru is _dead, dead, dead_). His answer was monosyllabic like always, like he doesn't care at all; like he doesn't care what happened to Naruto, to Sakura, to Kakashi; like he would be happier if they died instead.

He hasn't been happy in years, so why can't they just _die_ and leave him the hell alone?

"You'll… you'll _regret_ it." (What _doesn't_ he regret? He's regretted so many things that sometimes it's hard to face the wind (he's afraid that he'll get blown away); it's hard to see flowers wilt; it's hard to watch so many people get things wrong and repent when it's too late, too late, too late.

"Sasuke?" the voice—blonde—_Naruto_—says faintly, again (he wants to snarl, "_Stop saying my fucking name!_" because it really wasn't _his_ name, was it?) and his arcadia is broken, like glass, disappearing, fading away. He panics—inwardly _panics_—(what is he? _Crazy?_) because everything seemed like it was fading from him—his dead mother, his dead father, his now-dead brother, those red strings that he could never really see, his inner peace.

"What?" he croaks—he feels like he was recently taken away from a familiar warmth; it's empty, now. "_What?_"

"It's nothing," replies Naruto (it _is_ Naruto, right?) shakily. "It's just that we miss you."

He takes a look at his pale, calloused hands, activates his sharingan (he hates the way he can see _everything, everything, everything_ so damn _clearly_—he decides that this was the reason why the Uchiha clan failed; dreadfully _failed_) and he can't _see_ anything, just the chakra pattern on his skin; ignores the calls of Naruto; ignores his crazy thoughts (_Mother, darling, why won't you give me your hand?_); ignores everything and stares, stares—ignores the heart (it's _this hot?_)—his vision is blurring (what's this—_tears?_) and ignores them until his sharingan is blurred from _millions_—

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